This site does not intend to be another list of air accidents, the aim is to answer the question: is there a way to know if one airline is safer than another?

To reach this objective we started from a database including all fatal occurrences to commercial aircraft, scheduled and charter, specifying for each one of them the nationality of the carrier involved.
The next step was to relate the accident figures with a production element in order to get an output showing the number of accidents vs. the production performed.

Therefore we processed, for each ICAO country, the following ratio:

Number Of Fatal Accidents ÷ Production Performed

The selected Production factor was TKP (Tonne-Km-Performed), which includes the number of Km performed as well as revenue load carried (passengers + cargo) by commercial aircraft for each country of registration.
Through TKP one can include the full range of commercial aviation: domestic and international services, scheduled and charter operations; passengers and cargo flights.
The ratio is processed on five-years basis. This period is considered to be short enough to exclude old data, and long enough to be statistical significant.

With the above assessments one can have a safety snapshot referring not to a single carrier but to the respective civil aviation authority’s (CAA) capability for providing safety certification and oversight for its carriers. Such a procedure is not arbitrary but consistent with the historical trend of civil aviation safety.
An examination of more than half a century of data (the database starts from 1951) has given us the reasonable certainty that rather than safety problems to be ascribed to single carriers, there are problems attributable to the capability of respective CAAs in providing effective control of the carriers under their jurisdiction.
As further support to the above overview it is worth remembering that the USA IASA program (International Aviation Safety Assessments), started in 1991, is based on a similar concept:

«The purpose of the IASA is to ensure that all foreign air carriers that operate to or from the United States are properly licensed and with safety oversight provided by a competent Civil Aviation Authority in accordance with ICAO standards».

How can one evaluate the relative safety of an individual airline?
Having verified the safety record of an individual country, the traveller can then check what airlines from "safer" countries fly to the chosen destination, to decide whether to avoid the local carrier or not.